Escape Characters and Potential Numbers (ANSI and GNU Common Lisp Document)

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#### 2.3.1.2 Escape Characters and Potential Numbers

A potential number cannot contain any escape characters. An escape character robs the following character of all syntactic qualities, forcing it to be strictly alphabetic_2 and therefore unsuitable for use in a potential number. For example, all of the following representations are interpreted as symbols, not numbers:

     \256   25\64   1.0\E6   |100|   3\.14159   |3/4|   3\/4   5||

In each case, removing the escape character (or characters) would cause the token to be a potential number.